Sunday, 14 August 2011

Wow, they very nearly had a decent episode. And yet they are still dragging their heels over advancing the plotline... oh, and the religious themes continue...

Three different plot lines, and no Owen Danes. Huh. In the Rex/Esther plotline, they find out that the guy in charge is a douche... and that's about it. In the Gwen plotline, she gets her dad out, leaving all the other cat 1s to suffer whatever fate awaits them, and blows up a building killing whomever was inside (they say flesh burns). And in the Jack plotline, he finds out that there is someone pulling EvilCo's strings... and the word of the day is "Blessing". Yeah, google-search that for answers!

And yet, this episode, more or less, is a decent character piece. The focus of this arc has constantly been on the characters (certainly hasn't been on the plot!), and this episode has given the characters something to play. You know, there's a reason series 1 and 2 worked well, and that's because there was a range of episodes, and one could focus on the characters, one could be indepth plot, one could try something off-kilter... and now we have arc series which is trying to address all points spread out over all the episodes. No wonder it's generally having problems creating effective episodes. Here there was minimal plot (even more so than some), so it could be a more character-centric episode. And nice to see the military guy grow a pair. (And, hey, Ernie Hudson!)

However, there's still four episodes to go and hints of the bigger plot are attempting to show through, so it's a worry that we're suddenly going to get a cram of plot and exposition, and have episodes with too much of that, which is just as bad. They are having problems getting it right.